The Essays # 3 Shakespeare
So, this is my final week of my Bachelors Program as such… welcome to another hold over post, this is the third in the Essay’s series of posts. A little bit of Shakespeare. Next week I will see about getting back on track with World Building or Fantasy writing in general. Maybe I’ll talk about my current WiP which has been on hold for a couple months now… I kind of need the kick in the butt to get it going again.
The Breaking Point: Emotional Distress in Hamlet.
A Study of Queen Gertrude and Ophelia.
Put pressure on anything long enough and it will eventually break. When that pressure comes in the form of mental and emotional abuses some may endure while others break at the first press. With all the goings on of Hamlet playing mad and Claudius roiling in guilt, the women in this play must play nursemaid their men while enduring their own torments. In Hamlet, both female leads are emotionally assaulted until finally only madness and their deaths can release them.
Queen Gertrude and Ophelia take two different paths to their ends, but the impetus and destination are the same. With Gertrude it can be argued that her madness happened off-stage, before the play begins and that she has endured is perhaps going to come out all right. With the death of her husband and the rush to marry her brother-in-law, this could be chalked up to grief and temporary madness, and in the play is dismissed as her “frailty”. “Let me not think on’t,—Frailty, thy name is woman!” (1,1,146) With the opening of the play she is in better mood, and only wishes Hamlet to cast aside his mourning and stay home for a while, but Hamlet’s actions keep distressing her, bringing back the guilt and reinforcing the madness. In Ophelia’s case we have a woman whose love is spurned, her suitor—Hamlet—is spiraling through madness and anger, and finally her father is murdered by him as well. She breaks, just as surely and easily as a willow branch may break, “There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds/ Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;/ When down her weedy trophies and herself/ fell in the weeping brook.” (4,7,172-5) Whether truly an accident or suicide, poor Ophelia drowns, she is released from her pain and the madness. One has to wonder if perhaps Hamlet had entrusted her with his suspicions of murder, if he had told her that he was planning to act mad in order to cause Claudius to betray himself, and then maybe none of this would have happened. She wouldn’t have been tormented by his denials of love and his strange behavior.
Queen Gertrude is subtly while Ophelia is overt in nature; they represent both archetypes of distressed character. The subtle one is all internal, the origin of her madness is grief at the loss of her husband, and the first outward manifestation of that is her rushing to remarry. The fact that she encourages Hamlet to: “Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted colour off,/ and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark./ Do not for ever with thy vailed lids/ seek for thy noble father in the dust:/ Thou know’st ‘tis common,—all that live must die,” (1, 2, 68-72). Two months after the death of his father, and a month after her remarriage and she is asking him to stop mourning and treat Claudius better, if one interprets “Denmark” to mean the king and not the country. While this may seem that Gertrude has truly gotten “over” her dead husband, this is also part of a coping mechanism, where Gertrude is both grieving for the loss while denying that the loss has even happened. The truth of her grief can be seen in the way she avoids mention of her dead husband, and anything else that reminds her of him. Recent psychological studies have identified one type of loss avoider, titled the Ruminator, “Using an eye-tracking paradigm they showed that high ruminators made shorter average gaze times for loss- related stimuli but longer average gaze times for negative (and neutral) nonloss-related stimuli. This suggests that rumination is related to avoidance of personally relevant threatening material when less-threatening negative (and neutral) material is simultaneously available.” (Davis 212-3). As Shakespearian Scholar Magi Smith has stated; “Shakespeare is best seen than read.” As Gertrude is subtle the best way to see her emotional distress is to actually see it. Glenn Close in the Mel Gibson 1990 version of the play is particularly good. The scene with her confronting Hamlet on his actions and the play he put on for Claudius and then during the duel when she drinks the poisoned wine. Her face when Hamlet accuses them both of murdering the king, the shock and pain flashes across her face and then smoothes as she goes back into denial. Then once the poisoned wine starts to affect her, the look she gives Claudius before she stands, and collapses. The 2009 BBC production is also excellent with these scenes, though they play out differently. Especially the drinking of the wine, perhaps they meant it slightly tongue in cheek. But right before Gertrude, played by Penny Downie, drinks the poisoned wine she pauses for a second and takes a look at Claudius before drinking. Even Claudius, instead of being forced to drink the rest of the wine, picks up the glass himself, shrugs, and drinks. It’s almost like they wanted to put a little bit of levity in four characters dying horribly.
Back to Ophelia, as the overt side of the archetype, she is well and truly over the top. Her madness is implicit. From being dirty, to singing non-sense songs, to tearing off her clothes, and finally to strewing plants about the place; which apparently might have led to her death, unless it actually was suicide. Of course most of this is seen in the various productions of the play and how they interpret her words and actions. Between the stress of trying to understand why Hamlet is acting out the way he is and giving in to her father’s wishes to push Hamlet away, Ophelia is pulled in too many directions, her emotions are trampled, and the death of father is the final straw. Even her brother upon seeing her in her sorry state offers little in solace. Sure he talks about how if he hadn’t already been enraged at Hamlet this sight would be enough to do it, but nowhere does it mention any comfort given.
To bring it all together, Gertrude is the visage of a subtle
form of madness. Locked in a form of
denial that makes her move through life like nothing is wrong, until all the
very wrong things continue to crack away at her false exterior and expose the
pain within, until finally her blindness to the truth kills her. Though the scheming of Claudius has more to
do with her death, but without the blinders on she might have seen his
guilt. Ophelia is the other visage, an
overt and open madness. Driven by
conflicting emotional responses between her father and her suitor, denied the
love she sought, and finally denied her father entire. Her breakdown is spectacular and bold,
disturbing and all the more sad in that it probably could have been
avoided. Emotional trauma breaks both of
our female leads, crushes them on the way to the final catastrophe that leaves
most of our players dead on the stage of Hamlet.
Work Cited
ALISON A., CHAPMAN. “Ophelia’s “Old Lauds”: Madness and Hagiography in “Hamlet.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 2007, p. 111. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.24323015&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Davis, Esther L., et al. “Prediction of Individual Differences in Adjustment to Loss: Acceptance and Valued-Living as Critical Appraisal and Coping Strengths.” Death Studies, vol. 40, no. 4, Apr. 2016, pp. 211-222. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/07481187.2015.1122677.
Shakespeare, William. Complete Plays. Fall River Press. 2012.
Hamlet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Mel Gibson, Alan Bates, Glenn Close. Icon Productions. 1990
Hamlet. Directed by Gregory Doran, performances by David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and Penny Downie. BBC Productions, 2009.
Youtube Links (included to watch some of the key scenes mentioned in the paper)
Gertrude Drinks (1990): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoNAEfrI2oQ&index=9&list=PLxSwzWHIyoVEOmbM9xMjoCpyd0rIKK27V
Mel Gibson confronts Gertrude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a38HZFbhB-M
Mel Gibson 10 clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJmWpR-4AIg&list=PLxSwzWHIyoVEOmbM9xMjoCpyd0rIKK27V
BBC Hamlet (D Tennet) 26 part playlist, entire movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-NLnsq3P7Y&list=PL8653490E2C680C5C